“Big congratulations to Nico, he drove fantastically well all weekend and fully deserved the win”, said Hamilton. At last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, some weirdo went for a stroll on-track midway through the race, triggering a full-course yellow.
Advertisement
“Throughout the race I wasn’t really thinking about what happens when I catch him, I was just focusing on trying to catch him and put some pressure on”. The whole weekend went perfectly.
“It was close today”, he said. “But we must give credit to race control because they restarted the race pretty quickly and this is what we have asked them, not to spend endless time behind he safety auto”. Daniel tried to pull one on me with the pit stop at the end and I know it was going to be tight but I am really, really happy. The world champion had lost position to Raikkonen at Turn 10 12 laps earlier and that forced the Mercedes pit wall to think laterally to try to move him back ahead. “He whole auto was on the edge, it always is in Singapore so it is all the more satisfying to win a race like that”.
“The brakes were just on the limit but that’s expected and it worked out fine”. Dani and I fought quite hard, but we didn’t touch so that’s always a positive.
Mercedes had meant to bring leader Rosberg in after Ricciardo stopped at the end of lap 47, when the German would have completed a 15-lap stint on soft-compound Pirellis, but it abandoned the plan when it became clear the Red Bull driver was likely to jump ahead. It proved a tense finish as traffic prevented Rosberg pitting for new tyres near the end and Ricciardo, after his stop, closed the gap from more than 20 seconds to mere fractions over the final 14 laps. We’ve got to have a good weekend (in Malaysia).
“So I had to be on it in that last stint, get everything right and nail all those laps”.
The safety auto came out nearly immediately in the race due to a spectacular accident in the middle of the pack just after the start.
Rosberg held on to win by 0.488s, but despite such a narrow margin he insisted he was confident he would win once on the last lap.
Advertisement
“A statistic like that is not something I focus on, it doesn’t have any importance to me”, the 31-year-old said after winning his third race in a row. “Once I did my second or third stop we managed to sort it out”.
